Jon Sawyer, director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, gave the keynote at the New Journalism, New Ethics? conference at UW Madison and spent most of it on one of his organisation’s hardest projects. “As we create new financial and editorial models of journalism, we are also collectively creating the ethical ground rules for these forms of journalism,” he said.
The case was the Center’s reporting on child sacrifice in Uganda, published on its Untold Stories site. The photojournalist, Marco Vernaschi, had been commissioned for a story on maternal mortality in Nigeria and went to Uganda first; the Uganda work was funded after some of the reporting was already done, though Sawyer said he was confident it would have passed the standard procedure.
The controversy was over photographs showing violence against children. Vernaschi’s defence was that he was looking for visual evidence that would compel public attention and a response. The Center published some of the images and then removed them after criticism, much of it on photography blogs, of the pictures and of how they had been obtained.
Sawyer defended the story itself and kept it online, arguing that the project was larger than the disputed images. “The internet is both blessing and curse, and must be approached as such,” he said, thanking the bloggers for useful feedback while noting that the same debate carried half-truths and personal attacks on the photographer. The lesson he drew was less about principle than about capacity: the Center had too few editorial staff to supervise a project of that difficulty.